


Companions and Eventualities 5 -- Choice

by Viola_Laterra



Series: Companions and Eventualities [5]
Category: Enderal (Video Game)
Genre: Brave New World Ending, F/M, Identity Issues, M/M, Other, Post-Canon, Spoilers for Brave New World ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25027729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viola_Laterra/pseuds/Viola_Laterra
Summary: Grappling with the truth of one's nature is difficult, even with the help of those you love.Also contains exploratory botany/food science.(Takes place several months after the Brave New World ending.)
Relationships: Jespar Dal'Varek/Prophet | Prophetess
Series: Companions and Eventualities [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1809244
Kudos: 6





	Companions and Eventualities 5 -- Choice

One day we were climbing up one of the towers, in search of a component that we thought could re-activate what we thought was a power system of some kind. We'd just arrived at a spot with some space to rest; it had been an actual climb up a wall rather than up a stairway, as this tower's lift wasn't functioning. Though the Starlings often had stairs in case the power was out (rather smart of them, I thought), in this tower those stairs had crumbled -- possibly from the attack by the Steel Dragon, when we'd been here before the Cleansing. The attack had also blasted a hole in the side of the tower, through which we could see the afternoon sunlight playing beautifully over the surface of the lower parts of the Star City down below. And there were, for the first time, some gaps in the clouds underneath the City that the Cleansing had left impenetrable for months. We couldn't quite see land, but it gave me a strange feeling of hope to even have a hint of what might still be down there.

Jespar sighed as he pulled himself up onto the ledge next to me. "I'll never stop loving that sight." I smiled and looked over at him. He'd said, back then, "This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." And then: "No offense." It had been just after we'd decided to partner, and I found the statement amusing at the time. Now, I didn't mind it because the beauty of this place was one of the few things we had going for us, other than each other.

He perched himself on the ledge, hooking his legs around the edge, and pulled something to eat out of his pocket: one of the strange root vegetables that grew everywhere up here. Jespar began to munch on it absently. They didn't taste like much, but they were filling, we'd been able to consistently harvest them, and they kept well. I'd noted they also had beautiful little blue flowers when they were in bloom. Deciding what was safe to eat here had been a kind of trial-and-error process. Some things were the same as down on Enderal, or elsewhere on Vyn. But a few things were really ubiquitous here that were unfamiliar to either of us. If we could be sure they wouldn't have any ill effects, they'd provide an essentially inexhaustible source of food.

The first time we'd sat together, eyeing one of the common bean pods from the vines that grew abundantly on the columns in the lower city, we'd just looked at each other for a while. Jespar said, "I don't really want to be the first."

I'd crossed my arms and given him a look. "Maybe we should take turns, in case it makes one of us sick?" 

Jespar responded, eyebrow arched, "This was your idea. You go first."

"Well, I'm the one with magical healing abilities. If you get sick, then I can heal you. We can't do that the other way around."

I could tell he felt cornered. And I did know that about him -- Jespar hated to be trapped in any way. He looked uncomfortable, irritated that I'd come up with something he couldn't talk his way out of. Apparently it bothered him more than I'd guessed, because he said, "Well, you're not even human anymore. You survive all sorts of things!"

It stung. He clearly regretted it, the moment the words were out of his mouth. "I... I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."

I'd held up a hand. I took a moment. I put aside my hurt, because he was right. Maybe it was better for me to go first. I said slowly, "You're right. I am clearly stronger, more resistant, whatever the reason. I'll try first, and if I don't notice anything strange, then you can try it, and if you get sick, then I can heal you." He nodded, still apparently unhappy about what he'd said and unsatisfied with the conditions under which he'd won the argument.

The peas had turned out to be bitter, not actually poisonous, but not edible by any stretch of the imagination. I felt sick enough for the next day that I didn't eat anything. Jespar cared for me then even more assiduously than he usually did. But we used that protocol for unfamiliar foods from then on, and it had worked in our favor: there were many things that we found we could eat which were quite abundant up here.

Now, as I watched him crunch away at the root, I thought about these physical differences. Or maybe they were metaphysical differences. I suppose I'd been avoiding thinking about this part of things, all this time. During the Cleansing, and our escape, it had been all rapid-fire decisions and moment-to-moment choices. And then in the first months in the Star City, it had been about learning to survive up here: how not to get attacked by Starling technology, how to find food. But now, sitting here in this tower, for the first time I felt I simply couldn't ignore the reality -- and the enormity -- of what had happened to me. 

After a while, Jespar glanced away from the gorgeous sight below us and caught me gazing at him. I must have had a strange look in my eyes. "Penny for your thoughts?" he said through a bite of root vegetable.

I sighed. I said, "It's just... I don't *feel* like I'm not real. Or like I'm not... me."

Jespar swallowed. He put the rest of the root back in his pocket and leaned back against the side of the gap in the tower wall, studying me. "Well, I didn't know you before... all this. Do you feel different, after you... well, after you drowned?"

I didn't answer right away. I tried to think back to what it had been like, all that time before the ship to Enderal. I clearly did remember my childhood, with my abusive father, and the terrible calamity that had claimed my family, and that I had blamed myself for their deaths. That I'd had those dreams of Daddy and the house on fire for many many years before the High Ones had turned that device against me.

When I'd woken up on the Sun Coast... I had been so disoriented... 

I said, "It's hard to say, because I had never had magical abilities before. Whatever the High Ones did when they copied me from my former self, they also triggered the arcane fever, and with the Echo visions at the same time... honestly, it's a bit of a blur. I remember the Apothecarii being killed in the explosion. But... actually the first really clear memory I have after the ship was you finding me. The first clear choice I made was to go with you."

Jespar cleared his throat. I hadn't meant it as a romantic statement, but I guess it was, especially with the tone of voice I'd used: gratitude and admiration, I realized. So I smiled at him, then looked down, murmured softly, "You were the first clear thing in my new life."

He looked down at the City, too. "And I was such a great guide, was I?"

I considered for a moment and said, "Well, you explained Enderal to me, in a way that made sense. With an insider-outsider's perspective."

Jespar actually laughed. "I suppose that does describe my feelings about Enderal." He paused. "When it still existed, anyway." 

I nodded sadly, and said, "And even if you were paid to do what you did, following you on that first set of tasks did give me some focus, at least."

Jespar looked back up at me. He asked, "You told me that the Black Guardian said the High Ones made you an... exaggeration of your former self. Did you feel ...more focused? More driven?"

I thought about that for a moment. "Maybe? The power they gave me, the ability to see the Echo, and the sea of eventualities... once I had some understanding of that, it did feel good, powerful... I did like the feeling that maybe I could do something, if I thought something was going wrong around me, and I don't know that I felt that way before. But is that the powers they gave me? Or is that how they made *me*?" I leaned back against the side of the wall whose gap we were resting in. I looked across at Jespar and an amusing thought crossed my mind. "Though... I think I was more forward with you than I had been with anyone before I came to Enderal."

Jespar smiled and laughed. "Well, you *were* very charismatic. And persistent! And... ah, quite a specimen of human beauty." He cast a critical-but-admiring eye over me. "I didn't fall for you for nothing. I'm not sure I mind that about you, if they made you that way."

I laughed, too. "I'm still not sure if it was something in my personality that they exaggerated or if it was the confidence that came with the power. But... you didn't fall for me right away." He looked away and cleared his throat again. "Wait, when did you...?" I trailed off, playing back all our early interactions.

He seemed a little embarrassed. But he said, "I'll be straight with you. You caught my eye from the very beginning. But it was the way you handled Arantheal conscripting you into the Order and his whole cause of stopping the Cleansing, that really got to me." That had been right at the beginning of it all... I guess I'd known that, because he'd turned down my flirtations from the very start. But I guess I'd never really known what it was that had appealed to him about me, back then.

So I asked, "What about it 'got to you,' as you put it?"

He sighed and said, "You just... seemed like you had your head screwed on straight about it. Like you knew how absolutely fucked up things were in the world, and you didn't seem to think that Arantheal was necessarily right or that his cause was something to throw your life away for... You went along with it, you helped out. But you reserved judgment. And you took these... small actions, I guess? To try to make things right. And you didn't always intervene, and you didn't always turn people over to the authorities."

I nodded. After a moment, I said, "I do think that I had more clarity about being able to help people. I did feel like I sought to be more powerful, in order to help more effectively. But how much of that was the High Ones... *making* me that way? How much of that was the circumstances I was put in with the abilities I was given?"

Jespar said, "Does it matter?" He leaned forward and took my hands in his. "If I love you for the aspects of your best self? The thing you wished you could have righted about your former life, that you then went and made right, as much as you could? Is that so bad, even if it was the High Ones who did that to you?"

It was hard to feel bad about it, when he put it that way, and when he was looking at me like that. I leaned forward and kissed him softly. He made a little muffled sound of pleasure.

Leaning back and releasing his hands, I watched him open his eyes and wait for me to go on. I finally said, "I suppose that's true. Just as long as they're not actually controlling me anymore... but how can I be sure they aren't?"

Jespar sighed. He said, "Well, you told me they actually appeared to you. And you haven't seen or heard them since the Cleansing was... well, finished?" We had decided at some point that the High Ones had completed the Cleansing, several months after we'd come to the Star City. I said, "Yes, I haven't seen or heard anything that feels like them. But how can I be sure?"

Now Jespar laughed. He said, "I don't think you can ever be sure. But I couldn't, either... it sounds to me like they were able to feed on any single person's fear or anger or sadness. If anything, I think the fact that the two of us are the only ones left, and... and, because we have each other, we're relatively happy... I think they aren't that powerful, right now."

A thought seemed to occur to him. "And, besides all that. If you'd been some paragon of virtue, I never would have followed you. I mean, philosophically. I *didn't* follow Arantheal. There was something about you, about the way this played out for you... Yeah, it took a pretty long time for your way of thinking and acting to change my opinions about what *I* should do. It took... well, it took losing Adila," he paused for a moment, still showing the pain of the loss, and embarrassment about how he'd behaved towards me when he was coping with it. "Sure, having your company and support was a part of getting through that. But that was the support of a close friend, of a possible companion, not a 'hero'. I suppose your example of what it could mean, to help in the ways you were helping, did influence me. But your example wasn't some exaggeration of being some kind of savior. It was the little things -- like taking the time to bury Constantine, in the Living Temple."

I said, "That is a lot more like what I was like before Enderal. I never had the power to do anything big to help myself or anyone else, so I did the little things."

Jespar put a hand on my knee and said, "Then that's something I love about you that isn't the High Ones' doing. Sometimes all you *can* do are the small things." He paused for a moment, considering. Then: "And... I think you have still evolved, since you... well. Since you died."

I looked at him and thought about it for a moment. My dreams of Daddy had changed over the last months of the Cycle, and then had stopped entirely... if the High Ones had keyed in on my need not to be powerless to help people, then the abilities they'd given me had actually allowed me to fulfill that need. I did regret not being able to stop the Cycle, and resented the manipulation that had led me to play my part in triggering the Cleansing. But... I didn't feel that it was for lack of trying, and I knew I had helped people even in the apocalyptic world Enderal had become.

I felt a kind of peace, actually. Maybe a little guilt, at having chosen to survive with Jespar, up here. But it had been a split second to choose: try to save the other peoples of Vyn right now, and possibly fail, or try to take a longer view and try to both save future civilizations and perhaps stop the whole Cycle for good. Or perhaps win it on humanity's side for once.

But maybe I also felt I deserved a little rest after all the suffering I'd worked so hard to alleviate. That didn't seem like the feelings of a paragon of self-sacrifice... that didn't seem like the choices of a person driven by some artificially enhanced need to have the power to save people. A person like that would never feel able to stop, never able to rest. And I definitely felt the need to rest.

So I nodded at Jespar. "If I can change, then I'm not only what they made me. And if some of the things about me now are the same as they were before, maybe I can still say that I am myself. And if all they really did was give me the ability to see echoes of the past, the ability to use arcane arts, and... apparently immortality? Then maybe that's not so bad..." I trailed off, then added, "But they had also used me for their purposes, manipulated me." It was hard to let that go.

Jespar squeezed my leg and said, "The Veiled Woman saw something different in you. She's intervened multiple times, which is not apparently something she does all that often, if we believe the Black Guardian and everything else we've learned about her. The High Ones meant you to disintegrate with the rest of life on Vyn. And you didn't. So what you do with what the High Ones gave you... even though they had their own reasons, their own uses for you... now it's up to you to decide what to do with it."

I smiled at him. There was a place in the pit of my stomach which had been cold since the moment I'd felt the truth of the Black Guardian's words, that I was fleshless. And that place was now a little warmer. I still didn't know what would happen when the High Ones showed themselves again, if they would influence me, or if I could stop them, but... maybe, at least for now, I could own myself, even if they'd made this version of me. And if Jespar loved this version of me, had changed his own worldview and found some peace, because of this version of me... maybe that was reason enough to be willing to embrace who and what I was. 

I still needed to understand more completely what it meant to be immortal, to understand what was physically different about this body that was somehow more resistant to the effects of time. Did I need to eat? I did need to sleep, that I knew. But what else could I do, now that I knew the true nature of my form? I gazed out at the City below. I had plenty of time to find out, I thought.

Jespar said, "Well, shall we?" I nodded and we both stood and turned back to the shaft. We were only about a third of the way up. He sighed and lamented, "I wish it weren't so far. The air is thinner up here... harder to climb for as long. But, nothing to do except take the next step, right?" I nodded, and impulsively pulled him close and kissed him. The feel of his lips, moving against mine, and the faint tang of the root he'd been eating, felt very grounding. I eventually let him go, and he laughed and said, "Not the step I had intended, but a hell of a lot more pleasant." I smiled at him.

"All right, let's get going," I said, and we resumed climbing.


End file.
